Hey ​@Sam91 

great question, and smart of you to think about this before committing to a paid plan.

When you import your list from Shopify, Klaviyo often pulls in more than just your email subscribers — it can include anyone who’s completed a checkout, started one, or interacted with your store in some way. That’s likely why you’re seeing 8,000 profiles instead of the 5,000 you expected.

Since you haven’t sent any campaigns yet and don’t have engagement data, the best approach is to segment your list based on actual email subscription status. You can create a segment using:
“If someone is subscribed to email AND email is not blank.”
This will give you a more accurate count of contacts who’ve explicitly opted into email and are safe to email under compliance guidelines.

Next, you can also create a separate segment of people who are not subscribed to email or have a blank email address — and consider deleting them to reduce your billable profile count (Klaviyo charges based on active profiles). If you're not using SMS yet, you can safely remove SMS-only profiles too.

Finally, if you're still unsure about the quality of your list, you could start with a smaller warm-up segment and send a reconfirmation email to validate interest. But honestly, just filtering by subscription status should already give you a solid, clean foundation to work from.

Hope this helps — happy to clarify anything further if needed!

Best,
Arpit

Hi ​@Sam91,

Arpit already has an excellent suggestion, and I just wanted to follow up and ask if when you imported these Shopify contacts, you marked them as subscribed automatically? If so, that would make differentiating subscribed and not subscribed contacts a little trickier. 

That being said, you can still filter these people out by creating a segment with the definition “Person can receive email marketing because person subscribed and subscribe method is manual import”. It would look like this:

From there, you can suppress these individuals so they’re not longer eligible to receive emails.

Let us know if you need any additional help with this!

Hey ​@Byrne C, Yes I marked them as subscribed. When I further studied those lists, I found out there are so many profiles showing as unsubscribed. But the unsubscribe date is the same for all or most of the people, at least. I’m so confused how can I clean those list. Should I suppress the above segment you’ve sent? or what should I do? Any additional tips that save my klaviyo bill and give me real people whom I can send email too?

We have not perfected this yet, but listhygiene.com has been a simple, quick, frictionless solution. We used it for 1-time, but they also have ongoing.

Definitely recommend suppressing accounts that are showing as unsubscribe. Is the date shown the date that you imported all of the contacts to Klaviyo? It’s possible that they were already marked as not accepting marketing on Shopify so that translated to Klaviyo. As far as I know, Shopify does not store subscription date data so Klaviyo just automatically added a day. 

So I imported the list on July 3rd. When I segment the unsubscribed profiles. Here are two cases that are showing.
 

Unsubscribed on May 5 and subscribed on July 3rd on the day of importing. The profile has been marked as subscribed

why is that so? What step should I take next?

And again one last thing

Sorry for annoying, Thanks in advance!!

Hi ​@Sam91 ! 

Wanted to jump in here to clarify a few things! First, if a profile has a subscription status of ‘Unsubscribed’, this means that they cannot receive your email marketing and therefor these profiles do not count towards your active profile count and won’t impact your billing. 

If a profile was subscribed to email marketing through your manual import on July 3rd, and then unsubscribed after July 3, then you won’t be able to send them marketing emails.

If you want to clean up your list, but don’t have any engagement data to create an unengaged segment, there are a few options to consider: 

• Send out a campaign email to your email list so you can gather engagement data and THEN created an unengaged segment from there if your ultimate goal is to reduce to your active profile count
• Create a segment using the definition Byrne outlined above so you can identified the profiles that were manually imported and suppress them from your account 

I hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any additional questions! 

The easiest way is to create a segment of people who haven’t opened or clicked any emails in the last 90 days, and try a re-engagement campaign. If they still don’t respond, you can suppress or remove them to keep your list healthy.
Also, to avoid low-quality emails in the future, we started using multistep popups — they help collect better leads from the start.